Last Chance
by blahosaurus
Summary: The best laid plans of mice and men often go wrong.


_**Last Chance**_

Crushed, sun dried grass and hard packed earth. Stars everywhere. Hidden, watching in the bushes. Trapped in the summer shower puddles. Discarded all over the sky. Caught in his eyes. And then there were the shadows, spilled ubiquitously. Hiding him from the villagers that had hunted him out of the crops at the dead of night (because nobody dare live at this hour.)

He could still see them when he closed his eyes. Their torches, like the centre of the sun when he spent his days up in the trees, keeping safe from floor-crawlers, and stared at the sun as if he were trying to burn his memories away, so that the imprint of the orb stayed long before he looked away.

His life was breathless. Running out of oxygen as if it were hope. And now he was gasping for air. Trapped somewhere between the determination to live, and the wish he had never been born.

He leaped into a green infested tree, pain as known as the beating of his heart. He barely had to think about it.

He was melting, dripping unto the floor. Melting with hate and banishment. His skin on his right arms was slicked with a warm substance, drooling down his arm, thick. He looked at it, entranced.

It wasn't red. Or crimson. It was black, like ink. Like the spot of sky where the moon should be in the night of his weakness.

And that second, after months of half-puzzlement (a part of him asked the world why. And the other responded it was just the beginning of something that would never change) he understood the reason behind the cruelty. Behind his now deceased mother's tears. Black blood, tinted with the darkness around him, was what he had been born with. Just as Sesshoumaru had been born with stripes, and his mother with nails instead of claws.

He took in as much breath as he could in, filling his lungs as if he were just about to plunge under something monumental. Crickets sung. Trees creaked and rustled between each other. The world kept on spinning as if it didn't understand a little boy of little over seven had just accepted the fact that everybody hated him simply because of the way he was. Made.

He ripped a piece of red fabric from what he was wearing. It would part easily under his fingers, for some reason, and then grow back in a few hours as if it had a mind of its own. _(The only thing in the whole wide universe that wanted to protect him.)_ He tied it hard against his injury. It would heal soon, he knew, but the make-shift bandage would prevent excessive blood loss, leading to lack of strength.

Knotted tight like his soul, he lay back on the branch and closed his eyes away from the beautiful sky.

There was no space for beauty in his world.

Sleep carried him away to somewhere much better.

And so months passed. And things changed inside him.

If someone had a spot on their face, and everybody hated them for it, that person would come to hate it. That spot ruined everything. If it weren't for that one, single fact of a spot, he would be normal. He would be accepted.

But in Inu-yasha's case, he was the spot. And as suns burned and moons glowed, he began hating himself. For what he was. For what he meant. For what being did to him. And so he grew up so fast he forgot what before was like. He forgot what love was all about, what life was meant for. He kept his heart hidden so that not even he could reach it. Covered up with the thousand insecurities he held, the millions of insults etched against his mind, the billions of moments wasted on wishing he were something (_anything!_) else.

That's how he was fooled the first time. Plans were made for no one. Not for mice or men or even hanyous, because they all ended up twisted and wrong.

The first time he saw the priestess, he thought nothing more of her than what she superficially was. Inu-yasha, if anything, wasn't a fool. He knew that if the Shinkon no tama was in her hands, then she wasn't just a weak village miko. She was the real thing. The big fish. But that didn't stop him from his recklessness that had saved him in so many a occasion. But she turned out to be just as quick and strong as he predicted. And a hundred times more kind.

"Go, hanyou. Don't make me waste any more arrows on you." She had said after pinning his to the tree with four arrows. She could of killed him then. But she didn't.

That, in itself, put her apart from everybody else.

Love is the most treacherous thing in the world, he would come to find. It made no warning before sneaking into your heart. It had no mercy, gave you no other option. It made you do things, think things, that hadn't been there before. It controlled you in a way that only hate could rival.

Some may have thought that when the woman asked him to change, he would have been hurt. But it didn't. Maybe deep down, he preferred things were different, but her inquiry was what things were supposed to be like. He didn't _want _to be hanyou. He hated his crossed-over being just as much as everybody else. He had spent many night of his childhood cutting open his skin with his own claws just to see the black blood run. So when the priestess asked the monster to change, he didn't mind turning into prince charming. He had planned on changing anyways.

But that was another plan made, and another plan broken.

He would never forget the moment the arrow pierced his chest. For the first time, she hit him. Bull's-eyed him, right where it hurt the most.

And right to the second he stared into the dieing eyes of the woman he would have spent the _rest of his life_ with, he loved her with everything that let him share. There was no rift between them apart from the one inside him, the self-hate, the fear, the sickness that slipped into his mind, remembering everything done to him.

He closed his eyes with her bloodied image in his mind, and dreamt about nothing for a long time. He didn't feel the betrayal that had killed him more than the arrow ever could. He didn't feel the nauseating fact that after everything he had _learnt_, everything everything everything, he was still the one that lost. Nothing hurt more than sparking hope up in a cold place, only to snuff it out right after.

But then, suddenly, one day that was supposedly just like any other, a girl was pushed down a well and turned out in the middle of the past. He was not in darkness, or in light. He was nothing. And from that nothing came one thing, before consciousness took over.

_Here's your last chance. _

He opened his eyes right after being shot for letting himself believe and woke up in the middle of another muddle.

But this time he would make no plans, only promises. Sunshine leaked through.

The next time he cut himself, his blood was red.

Last chanced are the ones that are never wasted.


End file.
